As corporations and other entities have increased the numbers of their employees working mostly off-site, i.e., out of the office, the concept of “shared desk” often referred to, as a “hot desk” has become common. Using a hot desk, instead of each employee having their own individually assigned desk, employees are assigned an empty desk when they come into the office. However, a problem arises in that the telephone at the assigned desk does not have the employee's telephone associated with it. It is necessary that a telephone number be assigned to every telephone so that emergency telephone calls can be made. Note that certain telecommunication switching systems allow emergency calls to be placed from a telephone without a telephone number being assigned to the telephone. This requires that every telephone have a default telephone number. To resolve this problem for employee, the employee must transmit this default telephone number to people with whom they may need to communicate.
A telecommunication switching system can be manually reconfigured for each assignment of a desk. However, it is inconvenient and expensive to manually reconfigure the telecommunication switching system to assign an employee's telephone number to a new telephone each time an employee sits at a new desk. Further, the reconfiguration must be manually undone once the employee is no longer using the desk.
The assignment of a telephone number that is unique to the employee is not only important because other people may want to contact them, but also so that the features and utilization of the indicators and buttons on the telephone set can be customized for the employee.
Within the prior art, one solution to the above problem is to have specially equipped telephone sets that accept magnetic cards, similar to credit cards, which define the user to the telephone switching system. The disadvantage of this technique is the need for specially developed telephone sets.
In addition, certain telecommunication switching systems provide features for wired telephones utilizing the ISDN or proprietary protocols that allow a telephone set to have its telephone number modified by a user through the use of a feature code, a secret code, and the employee's extension number. After the employee enters this information, the telephone will be tailored to the needs of the user. Unfortunately, this prior art solution does require a number of manual operations on the part of the user.
Another prior art solution that has been used by some entities is to assign employees only wireless telephones, which they can then carry to any desk within the office complex. The same user always uses the wireless telephone; hence, it always has the correct telephone number.